The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[Ewan]

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I started writing a post about Pandoc and MMD, and how I wish Pandoc would 
borrow some things from MMD, and vice versa. 

Then it got a bit long, so I've put it here: 
http://ewcrr.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/the-intersection-of-pandoc-and-multimarkdown/

(this isn't my blog — I just don't know a better place to share HTML).

Just my $0.02,

Ewan
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Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[Ryan Gray]

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On Mar 23, 2012, at 6:12 AM, Ewan <ewancarr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> I started writing a post about Pandoc and MMD, and how I wish Pandoc would borrow some things from MMD, and vice versa. 
> 
> Then it got a bit long, so I've put it here: http://ewcrr.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/the-intersection-of-pandoc-and-multimarkdown/
> 

I, too, wish for such a thing, but I keep getting discouraged because it seems most people in each camp don't have such an interest in a unified extended Markdown that is more powerful than any.

Some things I like about Pandoc:

- All the command line options and the flexibility they provide. 
- The better equation support.
- The more extensive citation support.
- The Word .docx output with editable equations.
- The easy PDF generation.
- Its simpler table syntax, but would gladly give that up for a format that worked in other Markdown flavors. 
- That link URLs don't need spaces converted to %20.
- Superscripts and subscripts.

Some things I like about MMD:

- That when I need to, I can put some options in the document in metadata rather than keep separate. I don't like MMD's metadata restrictions though. I would like a mix of MMD's metadata and Pandoc's command line options. Some stuff I want to embed in the document, but I don't want to have to hold its hand to make a PDF.
- I like the simple reference format support where it's like a footnote and it makes a special section at the end. For simple things, this is great to keep the document self-contained. 
- The automatic cross reference links for images and tables. It does need some work as you point out in your post.
- It is more popular and thus supported in several editors.
- It is being ported to iOS, so will be able to be supported in editors there.

I think having a mix of the best of these is never going to happen for various reasons, so the best I can probably hope for is that Pandoc will just have an MMD reader so that I can use it as MMD with lots of command line options. 

One hope is that in recent discussions where each one is considers adding features that the other has, that they just adopt the syntax of the other rather than creating more differences. I know I recently proposed the opposite of this for metadata in Pandoc, but that's because I really don't like MMD's method, but I would take it if it meant some unification. 

I know John is at least considering supporting MMD tables, at least because it is what PHP Markdown Extra supports. I also saw that Fletcher gave some small indication of considering using Pandoc's syntax for adding super/subscripts.

- Ryan

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Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[Joseph Reagle]

On 03/27/2012 10:09 AM, Ryan Gray wrote:
> I know John is at least considering supporting MMD tables, at least
> because it is what PHP Markdown Extra supports. I also saw that Fletcher
> gave some small indication of considering using Pandoc's syntax for
> adding super/subscripts.

I've (inadvertently) been using MMD tables because if you use most text 
editors other than emacs there is not great support for tables. However, 
I select a sloppy MMD table in my text editor and invoke [this] script 
and it nicely aligns the columns. I then convert it into a pandoc table. 
I've been considering modifying the script to produce pandoc tables 
instead. However, I do prefer the alignment mechanism and spans of MMD.

[this]: 
http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2008/08/tables-for-markdown-and-textmate/

Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[John MacFarlane]

+++ Ewan [Mar 23 12 05:12 ]:
>    I started writing a post about Pandoc and MMD, and how I wish Pandoc
>    would borrow some things from MMD, and vice versa.
> 
>    Then it got a bit long, so I've put it
>    here: [1]http://ewcrr.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/the-intersection-of-pand
>    oc-and-multimarkdown/

Thanks for posting this here.  A couple notes:

> (I understand cross-references for section headings is in the works —
> using "cats <#cats>_").

You misunderstand, I think.  Pandoc already supports cross refs to
section headings, and has for many years.  If your heading is
"Introduction", you refer to it [this way](#introduction).

It would be good to add something similar for figures and tables.

> Pandoc has limited support for tables. Multiple columns, multiple
> rows, etc., would be nice.

In a way, multimarkdown tables are more flexible (they allow colspans).
But in other ways, pandoc tables are more flexible (they allow multiline
table rows, and even allow table cells to contain multiple paragraphs
and other block elements).

In any case, I will probably add support for MMD-style tables to
pandoc; there's already a pull request for this.

Have you seen my summary of the differences between pandoc and MMD?
https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/Pandoc-vs-Multimarkdown

John

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Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[François Gannaz]

On 2012-03-27, John MacFarlane <fiddlosopher-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
> In any case, I will probably add support for MMD-style tables to
> pandoc; there's already a pull request for this.

My pull request wasn't so ambitious. It would add support for markdown-extra
style tables, whose syntax is a subset of MMD's.

IIRC, the patch cannot deal with multi-line headers. And of course, neither with
column spans (which would have required to extend pandoc's internal format for
tables).

--
François Gannaz

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Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[Doug Calvert]

On 03/27/2012 10:47 AM, John MacFarlane wrote:

>> Pandoc has limited support for tables. Multiple columns, multiple
>> rows, etc., would be nice.
>
> In a way, multimarkdown tables are more flexible (they allow colspans).
> But in other ways, pandoc tables are more flexible (they allow multiline
> table rows, and even allow table cells to contain multiple paragraphs
> and other block elements).
>
> In any case, I will probably add support for MMD-style tables to
> pandoc; there's already a pull request for this.
>


It would be great if pandoc would support org-mode tables. The org-mode 
table editor is far and away superior to table in emacs.

Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[Joost Kremers]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 03:18:00PM -0400, Doug Calvert wrote:
> It would be great if pandoc would support org-mode tables. The
> org-mode table editor is far and away superior to table in emacs.

hear hear. 

-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments

Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[Ryan Gray]

On Mar 27, 2012, at 9:15 AM, François Gannaz <francois.gannaz-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> My pull request wasn't so ambitious. It would add support for markdown-extra
> style tables, whose syntax is a subset of MMD's.

That's perfectly fine. All the more compatible across markdown dialects.

We can debate about the merits of one table format versus another, but I think having something more compatible is very important to have in addition to the others.

Ryan

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Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[HansBKK]

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On Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:14:27 AM UTC+7, Ryan Gray wrote:
>
> On Mar 27, 2012, at 9:15 AM, François Gannaz <francois.gannaz-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> 
> wrote:
>
> > My pull request wasn't so ambitious. It would add support for 
> markdown-extra
> > style tables, whose syntax is a subset of MMD's.
>
> That's perfectly fine. All the more compatible across markdown dialects.
>
> We can debate about the merits of one table format versus another, but I 
> think having something more compatible is very important to have in 
> addition to the others.
>

Rather than ambiguous overlap between the MMD/PMD differences I'd like to 
see MMD added as a standard input syntax flavor.

That way one could choose one or the other, and those that prefer MMD would 
have a strictly compatible option among the other tools that support MMD 
now and in the future. 

If there are some compelling features available in MMD but not in PMD and 
enough PMD users lobby for them, then John could decide to add them over 
time.

A perhaps easier alternative would be a switch that selects MMD-style table 
syntax specifically, but to me that's just not as clean.

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Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[John Gabriele]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 5:17 AM, HansBKK <hansbkk-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> Rather than ambiguous overlap between the MMD/PMD differences I'd like to
> see MMD added as a standard input syntax flavor.
>
> That way one could choose one or the other, and those that prefer MMD would
> have a strictly compatible option among the other tools that support MMD now
> and in the future.
>
> If there are some compelling features available in MMD but not in PMD and
> enough PMD users lobby for them, then John could decide to add them over
> time.

Another nice benefit of having MMD be its own input format is that ---
if you wanted to --- you could easily convert an MMD-formatted doc to
Pandoc-markdown.

---John

Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[John MacFarlane]

+++ John Gabriele [Mar 28 12 08:56 ]:
> On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 5:17 AM, HansBKK <hansbkk-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> >
> > Rather than ambiguous overlap between the MMD/PMD differences I'd like to
> > see MMD added as a standard input syntax flavor.
> >
> > That way one could choose one or the other, and those that prefer MMD would
> > have a strictly compatible option among the other tools that support MMD now
> > and in the future.
> >
> > If there are some compelling features available in MMD but not in PMD and
> > enough PMD users lobby for them, then John could decide to add them over
> > time.
> 
> Another nice benefit of having MMD be its own input format is that ---
> if you wanted to --- you could easily convert an MMD-formatted doc to
> Pandoc-markdown.

How well does it work if you use MMD to produce HTML, then convert the
HTML to markdown using pandoc?

Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[David Sanson]

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On Thursday, March 29, 2012 11:09:44 AM UTC-4, fiddlosopher wrote:
>
>
> How well does it work if you use MMD to produce HTML, then convert the
> HTML to markdown using pandoc?
>
That won't work well for footnotes. One feature request that I've had in 
the back of my mind for many years is support for footnotes in the HTML 
reader. Support for footnotes generated by Microsoft Word (or tools like 
textutil that generate HTML from Word docs) and OpenOffice would be 
especially useful---I don't think that currently there is any good way to 
get from a Word file to markdown except via HTML?---but support for 
footnotes generated by Markdown and its kin would also be useful, as in 
cases like this.

-David


 

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Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[Ryan Gray]

I imagine it would preserve more semantics if you went via LaTeX, but that can require several extra metadata lines to create with MMD. 

Ryan

On Mar 29, 2012, at 9:09 AM, John MacFarlane <fiddlosopher-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> +++ John Gabriele [Mar 28 12 08:56 ]:
>> On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 5:17 AM, HansBKK <hansbkk-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Rather than ambiguous overlap between the MMD/PMD differences I'd like to
>>> see MMD added as a standard input syntax flavor.
>>> 
>>> That way one could choose one or the other, and those that prefer MMD would
>>> have a strictly compatible option among the other tools that support MMD now
>>> and in the future.
>>> 
>>> If there are some compelling features available in MMD but not in PMD and
>>> enough PMD users lobby for them, then John could decide to add them over
>>> time.
>> 
>> Another nice benefit of having MMD be its own input format is that ---
>> if you wanted to --- you could easily convert an MMD-formatted doc to
>> Pandoc-markdown.
> 
> How well does it work if you use MMD to produce HTML, then convert the
> HTML to markdown using pandoc?
> 
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> 

Re: The intersection of Pandoc and Multimarkdown

[Ewan]

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This is a rather late reply — I've been out the country for the past 
few months, so forgot about this post.

It would be good to add something similar for figures and tables.


Yes, I couldn't agree more. 

I will probably add support for MMD-style tables to
> pandoc; there's already a pull request for this.


That would be great too.

I've pretty much committed to Pandoc, in that, everything I write now
starts in Pandoc, rather than MMD. I'm in the process of writing a Perl 
script to convert MMD citations to Pandoc citations (e.g. [23][#citekey] 
to [@citekey, p. 23]). 

I'm also investigating using HTML5 + CSS to skip LaTeX entirely 
(e.g. https://github.com/ewancarr/printCSS) — something only possible
due to Pandoc's citation support. 

Thanks!


On Tuesday, 27 March 2012 15:47:15 UTC+1, fiddlosopher wrote:
>
> +++ Ewan [Mar 23 12 05:12 ]:
> >    I started writing a post about Pandoc and MMD, and how I wish Pandoc
> >    would borrow some things from MMD, and vice versa.
> > 
> >    Then it got a bit long, so I've put it
> >    here: [1]
> http://ewcrr.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/the-intersection-of-pand
> >    oc-and-multimarkdown/
>
> Thanks for posting this here.  A couple notes:
>
> > (I understand cross-references for section headings is in the works —
> > using "cats <#cats>_").
>
> You misunderstand, I think.  Pandoc already supports cross refs to
> section headings, and has for many years.  If your heading is
> "Introduction", you refer to it [this way](#introduction).
>
> It would be good to add something similar for figures and tables.
>
> > Pandoc has limited support for tables. Multiple columns, multiple
> > rows, etc., would be nice.
>
> In a way, multimarkdown tables are more flexible (they allow colspans).
> But in other ways, pandoc tables are more flexible (they allow multiline
> table rows, and even allow table cells to contain multiple paragraphs
> and other block elements).
>
> In any case, I will probably add support for MMD-style tables to
> pandoc; there's already a pull request for this.
>
> Have you seen my summary of the differences between pandoc and MMD?
> https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/Pandoc-vs-Multimarkdown
>
> John
>
>

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